Book Review: Invisible Selling Machine by Ryan Deiss

Ryan Deiss is the founder of DigitalMarketer.com and with aspirations to help double 10,000 businesses I had high expectations for his book on email marketing.

I have been on the Digital Marketer email newsletter list for quite some time (at least a year) and tried out one of his membership groups and Facebook group and was certainly not disappointed.

Although his content elsewhere is wonderful, books can be hard to write so I really wasn’t sure how well it would turn out. I knew it would contain valuable information but would it flow and entertain just as Ryan does through his videos and online interactions?

I am relieved to say that it is right on brand! Invisible Selling Machine is a great mix of stories, information and examples crammed into 160 paperback pages.(only available in Kindle edition on Amazon)

NOTE: Ryan does not make platform recommendations in this book. I recommend starting with a free platform, particularly MadMimi. I have since upgraded to Aweber and will move to ConvertKit once my list has outgrown Aweber.

I would say that as a whole the Invisible Selling Machine concept isn’t right for those just starting out as you need quite a bit of content to make full use of the system. However, it has a bunch of great ideas to start with regardless of where you are in your business.

The indoctrination or introduction stage is perfect for anyone at any level. Your audience deserves a proper hello and to learn more about who they are supporting and learning from so don’t hesitate to set up some “welcome to my tribe” introduction emails in your autoresponder sequence.

Phase two is about engagement and here it gets a bit tricky when starting out as you need quite a bit of content to share. Ryan does talk about sharing useful content from other blogs so there are options to keep things running while still being of value to your subscribers.

This can work but in order to grow a reputation as an expert in your chosen field and to be of true value you should be building content of your own over time.

Step three is where you start moving them from friends to buyers. You start to present offers based on the content they were interested in from their sign up through to the engagement stage.

If you don’t have an offer yet then continue to offer value through free content while building your offer.

Four brings us to the segmentation stage. This is where you may break your audience up by interests if you offer more than one area of business. For example, I will be starting to break people up in to interest groups like WordPress websites, social media management, content creation and more.

Now what happens if they aren’t opening up your emails or clicking on any of your content?

Ryan has that covered too. He introduces us to a re-engagement phase with examples in chapter 4. Then proceeds to break down each phase in the rest of the book.

The book may be short but it’s packed with great information to inspire not only your emails but also your landing pages.

Regardless of how new you are to the world off email marketing I would say this is a recommended read. It is inspirational, useful and will give you clarity around using email marketing and autoresponders.

Although I would say you need a bit more than basic computer knowledge to make sense of everything email marketing has to offer, you should still start building your list today.